Improving Survey Methods for Monitoring Recreational Fishing Effort and Catch

For many fish stocks, the recreational fishing sector now takes a significant fraction of the total amount of fish caught in a given year.  Hence, the accuracy and timeliness of recreational catch statistics has become a more important and controversial component of both stock assessments and fisheries management.

Recreational fisheries are important and growing components of many marine and freshwater fisheries.  Because recreational fishing is characterized by a large number of people accessing marine or fresh waters from many different points, these fisheries are usually more feasibly monitored and managed with different techniques than those typically used for commercial fisheries.  Each fisher typically harvests a small number of fish, but collectively the participants may take a very significant fraction of the total annual catch of a given fish stock.

Recreational fishery catch limits are being managed in different ways for different fish stocks, but the limits set for some stocks are sometimes greatly exceeded.  The adequacy of a particular survey design depends on the temporal and spatial scales used for management of the fishery.  This symposium will focus on reviewing a variety of alternative survey methods that are either being used or tested for the estimation of recreational fishing effort, catch per unit effort, and/or catch in different countries.  The emphasis will be on understanding how survey methods can be most appropriately matched with different fishing sectors to meet stock assessment and management requirements.